Wide-area physical networks may be communication-constrained because communication may be possible but too slow or too costly. A case where communication would be too slow is that of high-speed physical networks as used in high-frequency trading in financial markets and other electronic marketplaces, and in load balancing on IT and electrical networks. The “cost” for communication should be broadly considered as not just capital but also opportunity or risk exposure. For example, a case in which communication would be too costly is a battlefield scenario where any broadcast, even encrypted, could disclose a unit's location to the enemy.
In high-speed networks, advances in communications technology and data processing have enabled a dramatic increase in the speed and volume of the overall transactions which can be handled. Such increases in speed and volume, in turn, have introduced new problems of load balancing. So-called “flash crashes,” which at times have occurred in financial markets and other electronic marketplaces, and in IT and electrical networks, are extreme examples of the instability that can be introduced by the ill-coordinated activity of high-frequency automated traders or bidders, or of high-capacity core routers.
In financial trading, high-frequency transactions among broadly separated locations must be executed so quickly that direct communication among those locations is, even at the speed of light, sometimes too slow to be useful. This inability to communicate in a timely fashion has the potential to cause an unbalanced allocation of traders to markets. In particular, it can be that, in a small time interval, too many traders decide to sell the same asset on the same market, whereas with more effective coordination they could have distributed themselves across separate markets, in order to reach more buyers per seller.
Similar problems arise in the context of IT and electrical networks, where a core router—at the moment of deciding on which of various alternative routes to transmit the next packet—cannot coordinate its decisions with other routers through direct communication, because of the severe overhead and delay that such communication would impose on the network. This, again, leads to problems of high-speed load balancing, which if left unresolved can make the operations of the network unstable, or inefficient (as one must plan for extra capacity to reduce said instability).
Hence, there is a need for an improved communication system and method for enabling more effective load balancing of buyers and sellers across separate markets, in the cases of trading on electronic marketplaces, of traffic in IT and electrical networks, and in battlefield coordination.